Team Comment on the EGIX Submission

Embedding Glyph Identifiers in XML
Documents (EGIX) proposes a new XML namespace with a single attribute
containing a glyph identifier. This allows distinguishing different glyph
variants of the same character, or to identify glyphs where the corresponding
character has not yet been encoded. This is of importance in particular for
East Asian Ideographs (漢字), but also for other areas.

Being able to distinguish different glyph variants of the same
character is more important in certain languages and scripts (in
particular in East Asia) than in others. The Internationalization
Activity, with low but constant frequency, is contacted about solutions
in this area. A Web page has
been set up to focus discussion. This page also lists some technologies
outside W3C that attempt to cover similar needs.

Careful rendering of glyphs is important for high quality Web
graphics. Therefore, SVG has
support for alternate
glyphs, allowing the selection of particular glyphs for ligatures
and other purposes while keeping the identity of the characters in the
text intact.

The Submission only provides an identifier for a glyph. Means for
rendering glyph variants, and means for providing metadata (e.g.
pronunciation, meaning, usage, kind of variant, related variant,...) are also
relevant to an overall solution.

Feedback on this technology is encouraged on the www-international mailing list (public
archive). There is also a member-only mailing list devoted to this topic
(archive).
In particular, we would like to know whether there is a need for creating an
unified solution from the different existing approaches, what the
requirements for such a solution should be, and how such a solution might
look.

Disclaimer: Placing a Submission on a Working
Group/Interest Group agenda does not imply endorsement by either the W3C Team
or the participants of the Working Group/Interest Group, nor does it
guarantee that the Working Group/Interest Group will agree to take any
specific action on a Submission.